Spooky.

Knox of Pixels at an Exhibition fame (an excellent site devoted to iPhone photography—check it out sometime) recently pointed me to the blog Dangerous Minds, which in turn pointed me to a couple of recent news items involving the Beatles.

One concerned Ringo’s response to the Vatican’s recent decision that the Beatles were OK after all:

The Vatican offered its latest peace offering to The Beatles in its recent issue of L’Osservatore Romano, its official newspaper, on Monday.

“It’s true they took drugs, lived life to excess because of their success, even said they were bigger than Jesus and put out mysterious messages that were possibly even satanic,” the newspaper said.

But, “what would pop music have been like without The Beatles?” it reasoned, describing the band’s music as “beautiful.”

I guess this is what the Old Man meant when he said “At least the Catholic Church tries to come to terms with the modern world.” But if you ask me it’s too little, too late, and seems pretty half-hearted at that (is the Catholic Church the Mark McGwire of major world religions?). If the Beatles “put out mysterious messages that were possibly even satanic,” what in the Jesus, Mary & Joseph is the Vatican doing kissing up to them? Ringo agrees with me:

“Didn’t the Vatican say we were satanic?” Starr said during an interview with CNN. “And they still forgive us?”

“I think [the Vatican] has more to talk about than The Beatles,” he added, alluding to the child sex abuse scandal that continues to plague the church.

Which brings us right back to where we were three days ago. You have to go back a little further to find the post where I wrote about John Lennon’s personal supply of Owsley acid, which was smuggled into England inside film canisters. The other shoe has now dropped on that story, according to the Sun, via the Daily Telegraph, via Dangerous Minds, via Knox:

John Lennon experts are taking a, er, trip down memory lane with their latest finding.

Hardcore fans of the Beatles legend reckon they have uncovered where in the grounds of his Surrey home he hid his stash of LSD more than 40 years ago.

Builders digging up the lawn of his old house, Kenwood, came across the remains of a leather holdall containing several large broken glass bottles. Legend has it that John buried a large quantity of the drug in his garden in 1967 when The Beatles declared they had given up drugs in favour of transcendental meditation.

But when the band returned from India, John decided he’d been a bit hasty and tried to dig it up – but never found it.

Now fans are convinced these bottles contained the missing treasure – though they will never know for sure as the one bottle found intact had a cracked cork, so it was empty.

Too bad about that, I’m sure John would have loved to have turned us on one last time from beyond the grave.